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November 4, 2010

Chicken and the egg

Filed under: Random Thought,Storage,Virtualization — Tags: , , , , , , — Nate @ 5:24 pm

Random thought time! –  came across an interesting headline on Chuck’s Blog – Attack of the Vblock Clones.

Now I’m the first to admit I didn’t read the whole thing but the basic gist he is saying if you want a fully tested integrated stack (of course you know I don’t like these stacks they restrict you too much, the point of open systems is you can connect many different types of systems together and have them work but anyways), then you should go with their VBlock because it’s there now, and tested, deployed etc. Others recently announced initiatives are responses to the VBlock and VCE, Arcadia(sp?) etc.

I’ve brought up 3cV before, something that 3PAR coined back almost 3 years ago now. Which is, in their words Validated Blueprint of 3PAR, HP, and VMware Products Can Halve Costs and Floor Space”.

And for those that don’t know what 3cV is, a brief recap –

The Elements of 3cV
3cV combines the following products from 3PAR, HP, and VMware to deliver the virtual data center:

  • 3PAR InServ Storage Server featuring Virtual Domains and thin technologies—The leading utility storage platform, the 3PAR InServ is a highly virtualized tiered-storage array built for utility computing. Organizations creating virtualized IT infrastructures for workload consolidation use the 3PAR InServ to reduce the cost of allocated storage capacity, storage administration, and the SAN infrastructure.
  • HP BladeSystem c-Class—The No. 1 blade infrastructure on the market for datacenters of all sizes, the HP BladeSystem c-Class minimizes energy and space requirements and increases administrative productivity through advantages in I/O virtualization, power and cooling, and manageability. (1)
  • VMware Infrastructure—Infrastructure virtualization suite for industry-standard servers. VMware Infrastructure delivers the production-proven efficiency, availability, and dynamic management needed to build the responsive data center.

Sounds to me that 3cV beat VBlock to the punch by quite a ways. It would have been interesting to see how Dell would of handled the 3cV solution had they managed to win the bidding war, given they don’t have anything that competes effectively with c-Class. But fortunately HP won out so 3cV can be just that much more official.

It’s not sold as a pre-packaged product I guess you could say, but I mean how hard is it to say I need this much CPU, this much ram, this much storage HP go get it for me. Really it’s not hard. The hard part is all the testing and certification. Even if 3cV never existed you can bet your ass that it would work regardless. It’s not that complicated, really. Even if Dell managed to buy 3PAR and kill off the 3cV program because they wouldn’t want to directly promote HP’s products, you could still buy the 3PAR from Dell and the blades from HP and have it work. But of course you know that.

The only thing missing from 3cV is I’d like a more powerful networking stack, or at least sFlow support. I’ll take Flex10 (or Flexfabric) over Cisco any day of the week but I’d still like more.

I don’t know why this thought didn’t pop into my head until I read that headline, but it gave me something to write about.

But whatever, that’s my random thought of the day/week.

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